To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
Institutions – government, churches, industries, and the like – have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
The mind is not a hermit’s cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol.
The bashful are always aggressive at heart.
A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun.
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to “Americanize” him.
The more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of feeling that says mine, mine, more fiercely.
By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.
We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.
The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.
It is partly to avoid consciousness of greed that we prefer to associate with those who are at least as greedy as we ourselves. Those who consume much less are a reproach.
It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general.